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Why Ekphrasis? Author(S): Valentine Cunningham Source: Classical Philology, Vol Why Ekphrasis? Author(s): Valentine Cunningham Source: Classical Philology, Vol. 102, No. 1, Special Issues on Ekphrasis<break></break>Edited by Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner (January 2007), pp. 57-71 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521132 . Accessed: 27/05/2014 15:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Classical Philology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 192.76.8.49 on Tue, 27 May 2014 15:49:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WHY EKPHRASIS? valentine cunningham t is hard to imagine western literature, certainly the tradition of Hel- lenic/Roman/Christian/post-Christian literature, without what we can I call ekphrasis—that pausing, in some fashion, for thought before, and/ or about, some nonverbal work of art, or craft, a poiema without words, some more or less aestheticized made object, or set of made objects. This might be done by the poet, whose name we might or might not know, giving a whole poem over to such consideration, or stopping that action, the narrative flow of a longer work, to direct his gaze, his characters’ gaze, our gaze, for a while, at such a thing or things. Or it might be a matter of the novel turning the narrative focus, a character’s attention, the reader’s focus, for a time, on some such thing: a moment in which “The Story Pauses a Little” (as George Eliot puts it in the title of her chapter 17 of Adam Bede [1859]), for an epi- sode of intertextual or intermedial, or even, as one might say, synaesthetic miscegenating, overlapping, blurring—for some words about more or less artistic works not—at least this is the fictional claim of such moments—not made out of words. Just as in chapter 17 of Adam Bede, where the text and we are made to pause over the realist content of Dutch paintings, “old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands . those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions,” and so on, and we are urged to consider such paintings as models of a realism George Eliot both wants to advocate and also to practice in the novel before us. (No actual paintings are named, but it seems to me likely that she has in mind, not least, Nicolas Maes’ A Woman Scraping Parsnips [1655], bequeathed to the London’s National Gallery in 1838.1) The scope for ekphrastic focus is vast: shields, urns, cups, statues, frescoes, tapestries, cartoons, paintings, photographs, movies, bits of buildings, whole buildings, ruins of buildings. These may be real, actual frescoes, statues, paintings, ruins, whatever, or they may be fictional, made-up ones. I don’t think that matters all that much, either in theory or in practice. But whether real, historical items, or invented ones, the imperative that literature seems to feel to picture such nonverbal items, to incorporate them into text, to have us picture them along with the writer, the poet, the novelist and their characters, does appear to be simply inescapable. Ekphrasis is certainly one of litera- ture’s oldest and longest-lasting effects and practices. From early to late, from 1. See Cunningham 1975, p. 145, n. 2. Classical Philology 102 (2007): 57–71 [ç 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved] 0009-837X/07/10201-0004$10.00 57 This content downloaded from 192.76.8.49 on Tue, 27 May 2014 15:49:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 58 Valentine Cunningham the beginning to now, this kind of encounter, stories of this kind of encounter (sometimes even repeats of the very same encounter) keep happening, keep returning, keep being textually renewed. The Homeric poet gives us Achilles’ shield, and Vergil revisits and revises this arresting meeting as the shield of Aeneas, and W. H. Auden returns to both of these shield-meetings, one in his poem “The Shield of Achilles,” the other in the poem “Secondary Epic.”2 Such revisitings not only keep the western imaginaire, the western tradition, alive, they are the lifeblood of the ekphrastic mode. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene Book 3 the good heroine Britomart is shown a set of tapestries depicting Jove’s love affairs. These depictions repeat the woven stories of Arachne, woven in her competition with Minerva in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.3 And metamorphosing encounters with Ovid’s presentations of metamorphosings keep recurring across the whole tradition—as, not least, in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where a painting of the Rape of Philomel is displayed over the antique mantelpiece of the room in the poem’s part 2, A Game of Chess.4 In the Purgatorio, Dante describes the sculptures he encounters; standing on a Victorian London pavement Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes a great Winged God arriving at the British Museum from Nineveh.5 The painter-poet Rossetti of course writes numerous sonnets that are commentaries on pictures, his own—as, for ex- ample, “‘Found’ (For a Picture),” the picture being the one about a country- man finding his lost sweetheart, now a prostitute, on London’s Blackfriars Bridge—and other people’s, such as “For ‘The Wine of Circe,’ by Edward Burne-Jones.”6 Swinburne devotes longer poems to describing and com- menting on works of art—for example his “Hermaphroditus,” addressed to the statue of that name in the Louvre—the sculpture that also inspired Gautier’s “Contralto.”7 In fact, the poem as description of and commentary on some painting is almost a norm of western poetic production—Auden on Breughel’s Icarus painting or paintings in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, it might be, or John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” about and on Francesco Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and so on and on.8 For their part, novels, whether classic ones, ones in the great tradition, or not, novels of every sort, simply could not manage at all without the ek- phrastic encounter. Wherever you go in the House of Fiction you find yourself in the presence of such meetings. In Pride and Prejudice, it might be, in which Elizabeth Bennett has her view of Darcy changed as she stands silent before his portrait in his ancestral home of Pemberley.9 Or Middlemarch, in which 2. “The Shield of Achilles” (1952), “Secondary Epic” (1959?), in Auden 1976, 454–56. 3. Spenser 1977, Book 3, The Legend of Britomartis, or Of Chastitie, canto 11, stanzas 29–46, pp. 407–10. 4. Eliot 1963, 66. 5. “The Burden of Nineveh” (1870) in Rossetti 1961, 14–19. 6. Both poems in Rossetti 1961, 258 and 139. 7. Swinburne, “Hermaphroditus,” in Swinburne 1863, 91–93; Gautier, “Contralto,” in Gautier 1872, 51–56. 8. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (December 1938), in Auden 1977, 237; Ashbery “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1975), in Ashbery 1994, 188–204. 9. Austen 1813, part 3, chap. 1. This content downloaded from 192.76.8.49 on Tue, 27 May 2014 15:49:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Why Ekphrasis? 59 Mrs. Dorothea Casaubon is shown to us in the Vatican Gallery in Rome among the sculptures, the Belvedere Torso, the Ariadne—commented on, for our benefit as much as for the narrative’s own purposes, by her cousin Will Ladislaw and his friend the German painter Naumann.10 Or Henry James’ The Wings of The Dove, in which the dying Milly Theale is induced by Lord Mark to look at, and reflect on, Bronzino’s Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi.11 Or Huysmans’ À Rebours (Against Nature), in which the decadent connois- seur Des Esseintes is shown sorting his Goyas: Goya’s “etchings and aquatints, his macabre Proverbs, his ferocious war scenes, and finally his Garotting, a plate of which he possessed a magnificent trial proof printed on thick, unsized paper, with the wire-marks clearly visible.”12 Or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which we meet Dorian contemplating and enumerating his collections of jewels and exotic musical instruments, his embroideries and ecclesiastical vestments.13 Or, again, it might be Claude Simon’s Les Géorgiques, that curious revision of the Spanish Civil War nar- ratives of George Orwell, in which a famous photograph of Republican vol- unteers en route to Spain gesturing through the windows of their railway carriage is painstakingly scrutinized.14 Or Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, a novel about the famous New Orleans jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden (who left no recordings), triggered by the only surviving photograph of Bolden’s band; or Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, that record of maritime disasters, whose centerpiece is the chapter on Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa—accompanied by a pull-out reproduction of the painting; or the many fictions of W. G. Sebald, whose pages come littered by photographs, picked up randomly in markets and second-hand shops, to illustrate scenes and persons of the narrative; or the novels and fiction-factions of Iain Sinclair, ekphrastic to an almost over- powering degree, and likewise incorporating found photographs that are then described in the writing—like the colonial scenes adorning the endpapers of his Downriver, and the South American photos in his Dining on Stones.15 As for Iris Murdoch, doyen of postwar British fiction, her ekphrastic content may be thought a shade on the excessive side, so repetitive is it, but its excess does bring home the centrality of the procedure in modern fiction.
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